#I just want a more nuanced perspective on the Soviet Union!!!

[rincewindsapprentice]

Not to do a 'hot take' but the idea that the Soviet Union was uniquely awful in the 20th century just doesn't really make sense.

Important for reading comprehension: the Soviet Union was an imperialist power that did stamp down on mass movements and did kill millions of people, overthrow peacefully elected regimes, and repressed much of its population. This post is about how it is characterized as uniquely evil and awful and terrible

The important point is that so many other nations in the 20th century did terrible shit on the order of the atrocities committed by and in the Soviet Union. For example, Britain perpetuated the Bengal Famine (0.8-3.8 million deaths), the US overthrew peacefully elected governments across Latin America (eg Peru), Africa (eg Congo), and Asia (eg Iran), the Belgians committed atrocities in the Congo and instigated genocide and instability in the region (eg Rwanda/Burundi genocides), etc etc etc. The constant need to disavow the Soviet Union is just anticommunism and is pro-capitalist and is not well informed by history. It is a relic of the Cold War.

You literally cannot say a single positive thing about what people in the Soviet Union did, or even what the Communist Party did, without someone chiming in to say "well actually, it was evil, remember?" So is the US, so is the UK, etc. etc. But we (generally) don't feel a need to add that same kind of disclaimer if a US citizen did something good in the 20th century or if the French government did a good thing after WWII.

[trashballerina]

Hetalia Fics I Really Like

this  ⭐ will be for fics I really like. I’ll try not to star everything.

I’m starting with my favorite of all time and tbh I think the fandom should see this fic as a OG, like Auf Weiderstein Sweetheart or Gutters, I really do.

Are We Even Humans  ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ (Literally all the stars)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/4103344

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5660761/chapters/25048773 (prequel)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7036330/chapters/16007758 (sequel)

The war is over, but putting together everything that fell apart will be a greater challenge than anyone is prepared to handle. Alliances dissolve, and the lines between friends and enemies are blurrier than ever before.

Opinion: Please read it. It is a series with a sequel and a prequel that can be read on its own but it’s so good. Imma go on a quick rant here. This fic is great from the writing, plot, characters, and the nuances of nationhood abilities. I literally rioted during the first chapter because it was so good. One of my absolutely favorite things in the fic and the series as a whole is Prussia. Kingdom of Prussia, German Democratic Republic, Gilbert Beilschmidt. His character progression and seeing him through the series as a whole is astounding. I was literally left shaken at the end of this series and I’ve read it twice. The OC’s are usually the antagonists, but hot damn, they are memorable OC’s who are great (terrible?) villains. And the family dynamics! The family dynamics are enough of a reason to read it by itself and the romances. Omg I love this fic so much. Main takeaways: astounding characterization, amazing plot, will cry, long read, and a reality check on what it means to be a nation.

Would it be too much if I did a separate post on how much I love this series and an in depth analysis? (I feel like such a nerd omg)

Hard Times Passing 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23516458/chapters/56397817

Alfred is homeless during the Great Depression and in his wanderings he's charged with the task of caring for a small orphaned Taiwan. AU-Human names used, Taiwan is a child.

Opinion: So incredibly heart warming. It’s well written and I love the dialogue so much. Also, the little cameos from other characters are an absolute delight. It’s a it short, but so wholesome.

Flowers Don’t Grow on Battlefields  ⭐

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14153106/chapters/32619954

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16898919/chapters/39697068 (sequel)

As war tightens its hold on the nations of the world, new alliances are formed. Nobody will escape the war unscathed. Italy only hopes that this time, he will find a way to save those he holds dearest.

Opinion: I realllly like this fic. Maybe I’m a bit bias because I remember reading it from like to third chapter and watching it get updated till the end, but this is really good. Cute gerita, great characterization, good plot, and some lines just really make me melt. And the fluff omg. There’s a sequel that’s linked under too that I may like more than the first. 

Who Knew (One Shot)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23516695#main

“The last time the two of them had any sort of contact was when Gilbert sent the letter to Matthew before the first war started.

That was twenty-six years ago. Twenty-six years Matthew had not seen Gilbert. Twenty-six years of Matthew worrying about if his fiancé was alive or not. Twenty-six years of Matthew thinking about all the horrible things that could be happening to Gilbert. Twenty-six years of Matthew wishing he could just see Gilbert, even if it were just for a second. Twenty-six years of pure hell for Matthew. Twenty-six years of being all alone.”

Matthew Williams, the personification of Canada, never thought that he would fall in love, but he did. He fell in love with Gilbert Beilschmidt, the personification of Prussia, but their romance would have to be cut short with the up coming war that was soon approaching them.

Opinion: My god my heart. Matthew had great characterization. Like amazingly so. 10/10 somber and melodic tones throughout the story. Good tension. And again, my heart. 

TELL ME A PIECE OF YOUR HISTORY  ⭐

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3741175/chapters/8294941#workskin

An account of the media reactions to the reveal of Nations (anthropomorphic national embodiments) with scholarly commentary.

Heavily inspired by: United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) [fallingvoices, radialarch] with mixed genres.

Opinion: It’s really cool. It’s told through media, like email, twitter, texts, online magazines, subtitles of videos (not actual videos tho). I love the outside view point of the world on nations and how some people really like them and how others absolutely despise their very existence. One of the main things that sticks out the me is the in depth analysis other humans or posters do on the nations and people even interview the nations, chapter eight is like my favorite for that reason, or how some humans just gush about the nations on so media like how half the fandom does lol. It’s really good. Super creative, great insight on how to world sees the nations, and honestly a great read.

Red Winter (One shot and crossover!)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/909492

The Winter Soldier's new target: a Russian politician named Ivan Braginsky.

Things don't go as planned.

Opinion: Literally so cool. Like nations are total BS to outsiders, especially assassins. I was loosing it during this fic because from Bucky’s POV nations are something else. The writing is really solid and the author uses italics to highlight an action sound or word and even single-word thoughts. The fight scene is really entertaining but also it flows fantastically. 

In Costa Rica (Oneshot)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18614041

“You have this backwards,” McLaughlin said. “Everything. You have it all backwards.” He was a lithe man, looked to be in his mid-thirties. Schnabel leaned back in his chair. Outside, the afternoon rain started, and the frogs momentarily fell silent. “They are dangerous, aren’t they?” Two men discuss the nations and history.

Opinion: No actual nations appear in this fic. It’s just two men talking about the nations and it’s really interesting to see them humor and take seriously the idea of nations. They both discuss what they already know about the nations and theorize. Also hearing an outside perspective and how the nations effect the word around them is golden. I give this fic a big ol’ chef’s kiss. 

Finally, I’ll Just Miss You! (Oneshot)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/15553608

Countries will be abolished tomorrow. For the first time, they breathe and realize this might be their last breath and they’ll never wake up again. They want to wake up, they want to go to sleep, the land will still be there when they’re gone. But they breathe, it won’t be the same- for once, they feel human.

Opinion: Bro, I swear I’m not crying. This one is short but really bittersweet and my heart really hurts. I like the snippets of insight on the characters. 

Diamond in the Rough  ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12872642/1/

The year is 1952, the last full year of Joseph Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union. After an incident with Latvia, Estonia is determined to find out what Russia did to him. And so unfolds a chain of events that would lead the Baltic States to tears, to forgiveness, to unexpected courage and horrifying discoveries about the mysterious past of Gilbert Beilschmidt. See AN for rating.

Opinion: This just be a legitimate book. I have honestly read this one like three time and every time I read it I am absolutely elated to discover another detail or action I missed. It is a longer read but I think it is absolutely worth it. For one, the characterization is beautiful. Maybe I might be bias because I stan and love the Baltics, but how they are written compared to the many other fics I’ve read on them is phenomenal. While the author does take some creative liberties and deviates from canon a little, like the Baltics actually considering themselves to be brothers, I really enjoy the changes. ALSO, the history and research and on this fic is genuinely impressive. To think fic authors do this shit for fun and pour so much of their passion into a piece of writing. Secondly, while Russia may be an antagonist in this story, I honestly think it is just. His mentality, backstory, and current predicament explain his behavior and make him a justifiable antagonist. I highly recommend this one. 

Adieux (Oneshot)

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6700886/1/

What happens to nations after they cease to exist? Do they simply disappear or do they get a second chance? It wasn't a subject Francis was particularly keen on finding out about...but at the same time, it wasn't something he could just ignore. One-shot

Opinion: I hate this fic because I love it way too much. I might of cried a little bit and I instantly melt of Francis and Matthew. 

In Our Solemn Hour (incomplete) ⭐

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8975529/30/In-Our-Solemn-Hour

The time was World War II, at the dawn of a global conflict like nothing any of the Nations had ever seen before. Nothing could've prepared them for what lay ahead: a war more total and radical than anything they could ever have imagined. This wasn't just business as usual; it was centuries' worth of pent-up emotions all coming into play at once. This was indeed their darkest hour.

Opinion: Characterization is on point. One part of this fic I remember very well during a fight to the death, Finland mutters a little “Oh dear”. The characters retain some of the qualities that make them silly in Hetalia but because this is another take on it it does get darker. I think Germany’s portrayal is my favorite because he does cruel and unnesscary things and questions it because its not his usal nature. The author notes are super insightful and sometimes funny; it really adds to the rest of the story. I might revisit this post to make a more in depth opinion on it because I don’t remember it all to well when I know I really like this one.

So that was my post lol. I’ll probably make more on other fandoms later tbh or I’ll just make a part two. If you end up reading about any of these posts, please feel free to tell me about them! I love talking about fics and reading in general. Thanks for reading!

[battle-of-alberta]

BoAB Meta Essay 1: 5 W’s

Hello and welcome to this strange and silly yet semi-serious project of mine. Battle of Alberta is a Hetalia-inspired comic and ask blog following the adventures and mishaps of rival Canadian cities Edmonton and Calgary. I started this blog in 2018, though I first created the characters a decade ago in 2010 as fan characters for the I Am Matthewian Project. This little illustrated essay is just an introduction to me, my orientation towards this project, and why the heckaroonie I’m doing this.  

Who: About the Author 

My name is Hapo. As I’m writing this, I’m a graduate student at the University of Toronto and hope to have that wrapped up in the spring of 2020. Though I’ve been dragged around the continent for one reason or another (usually the result of a gravitational pull of a university town), I consider Edmonton to be my hometown and fully acknowledge and relish in the resulting bias I was raised with. I am a 3rd or 5th generation Albertan depending on how you count it and a settler on Treaty 6 territory. My educational background is in Classics, Ancient Societies and Cultures, Linguistics, Archives, and Museum Studies; my academic interests kind of revolve around the construction of culture and memory. I also tend to enjoy challenging stereotypes and misconceptions and disturbing ideas about seemingly hierarchical top-down, center-periphery relationships. Most of all, I love drawing satirical comics of varying degrees of silliness and sharing them with people. I currently use a Wacom tablet and Clip Studio Paint for my comics.

What: Writing About Cities

I chose to focus on cities because it’s the kind of granularity I like to write about; I find writing from a national perspective too broad and difficult to rationalize from my own experience and while I’ve written from the provincial level in the past, I most enjoy the level of nuance and every day information that comes from living in and studying cities. My other comic, @athensandspartaadventures​, kicked off my love of writing city-states, and my travels to other Canadian cities over the course of my post-secondary studies fueled my desire to learn more about municipal histories. 

Listening to the news, joining protests, and navigating my way through adulthood pushed me to learn how to participate politically on a local level as well. The 10th Annual Hurtig Lecture at the University of Alberta featuring mayors Don Iveson and Naheed Nenshi on the future of cities is an event I feel shaped my attitude towards cities in general, but it also encouraged me to look at the cities I knew with a different, optimistic perspective. I want to inspire readers to understand their own municipalities as complicated, messy, and in need of love and support from the inside.  

When: Then and Now

While I wouldn’t define myself as a historian per se, I tend to look at many things through a historical lens. The history is an integral part of the story that shapes these characters, and while I don’t mean to use history to justify one narrative over others, I do have to make some decisions and choices about the stories that I tell and the characters I am building for consistency’s sake. 

What sets interpretations of personifications apart is the author’s own experience, and at the end of the day it’s my interpretations, gut reactions, and personal experience that colour my work and my view of history. I recognize that I have my own biases and ways of thinking that are rooted in my view of the world as it is today, and I also recognize that those understandings can change. This blog is less a chronicle of one monolithic view of history and more a chronicle of my own perspective and growth. 

During this project, I won’t be shying away from certain historical periods and certainly not modern politics. That said, I also will not be answering asks that are deliberately politically or historically insensitive, nor will I be going out of my way to render explicit periods of great pain or violence. My own discretion is not perfect, but I will be using it as I see fit and trying my best to be responsive about it.

Where: Oil Country

Gavin Crawford probably says it best in his Wild West miniseries satirizing a wide cast of provincial stereotypes: “What do I like best about Alberta? It’s where I live.” My family settled in Alberta before it was a province and while I was not born there originally, it is where I would always leave from and come home to, it was where I went to school and kept all my things, it was where I formed my fond childhood memories and my political attitudes as an adult, and whether I was living in sub-rural or suburban Alberta or across the continent from it, it was always Where I Lived and Where I Would Go if I could click my heels three times. 

I was born in the economic fall out after the NEP reinforced divisions with the rest of the country. I was in grade school while Klein was handing out prosperity bonuses at the height of the boom when we still couldn’t afford textbooks from after the fall of the Soviet Union let alone teacher’s salaries. I didn’t really understand the ire we drew from the rest of the country and the world until I joined the I Am Matthewian Project in high school, and suddenly I had to make a lot of decisions about my own political identity I hadn’t previously considered. 

I understand what it’s like to live in a (tongue-in-cheek) ‘petro-archy' and the culture shock of stepping outside it. I know how it is to feel constantly under siege by the rest of the world to the point that all rhetoric is reduced to calling out hypocrisy while refusing to analyze yourself. I have felt inexplicable rage boil up when hearing jokes or perceptions of my backyard from people in central Canada or other countries, and then having nothing to fall back on when being accused of having no history or culture. Most of all, I get what it’s like to be bombarded with all this stuff as a teenager and as a young adult, and I get how difficult it can be to navigate when you’re constantly and almost exclusively met with “everybody hates Alberta”. My province is dumb, it should be criticized, but I also love it fiercely and I dare everyone, Albertan or otherwise, to start to imagine it better.

Why: Battling it Out

We’ve been through why I am writing about cities, why I’m looking through a historical lens, and why I am a little obsessed with the problematic image of my home province. I think the final question is: why frame it with the Battle? The Battle of Alberta is an age-old rivalry that transcends the sporting events it is commonly associated with, as I touch on in Chapter 1. It’s the source of a lot of amusement for me when reading headlines and listening to petty jabs whether on the radio or in restaurants. It’s something that dies down with each new generation only to flare up again over some issue or another. 

Most of all though, I like to think of it as the start and the end of a healthy relationship, a competitive spirit that makes us strive to be better than each other and better than ourselves. It’s the thesis statement of this project and the wish I have for the future. I don’t mind whether you want to read it as petty or serious, as platonic or romantic, but it’s enduring, it’s constant, and I believe at the end of the day it can be used for good.  

That’s all from me for now, I look forward to your questions and comments as well as to writing more meta stuff like this!  

Hapo

[marxsgrandson]

“You’re not Russian, you’re just American with some Russian blood”- my Israeli PS professor (who is neither Russian nor American nor knows anything about me)

Long post ahead: read it if you’d like but mostly just hoping there’s someone else who can relate to the feelings I’m about to express. So here goes:

Had an unbelievably shitty day today.

I’m in this one political science class. It always ends up somehow ruining my mood. It’s the one with the shitty German men who confronted me in a group after class accusing me of being uncritical towards the Soviet Union, being an antisemite (lol these aryan guys were calling me an antisemite. Like they’re confirmed non-Jewish) and being a dumbass for not idk sucking Gorbachev’s dick personally would be the next leap there. Idk if I posted that here, but it’s necessary context.

Anyways today we were talking about Russia’s motive in x place and just jumping around to every unrelated topic about something about Russia because our class always gets sidetracked and never finishes the lesson we were supposed to do. And of course the Europeans were being pieces of shit.

And the prof said something like “I wish we had Russians in the class to offer maybe a Russian perspective too... like gosh that would be nice. Do we have any Russians?” And I sort of tentatively raised my hand half way because I’m half Russian and when she was looking around the room and didn’t see me, I said “I’m half Russian and this is actually something I heard and talked a lot about growing up, I could take a try at it”

“You’re not Russian, you’re just American with a little Russian blood” she said, dismissing me entirely as the class laughed like it was the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. I now realize what it means when people say they feel stung. I was paralyzed by those words and I don’t really know why. What makes it hurt more is that starting two seconds later she called on a series of five German douchebags to try and explain Russia’s motives and says “huh that’s an interesting idea” after each of them say something painfully obviously wrong. And I felt frozen.

If given the chance to unfreeze myself, I wish I said what I was feeling but didn’t have words for: “Hey. That’s not true. Russian was the language I said my first words in. It’s the language of my childhood and my soul. It connected me to something I felt distant from during the school day. I taught myself to read this language as soon as my mom taught me the alphabet as a little kid. I went to Russian school on the weekends when I was young. I worked hard to keep up this language even though I went through shit from my peers for it. I was the only speaker of this language I knew that was my age after the age of 10. The only other time I’d hear it was when my mom criticized me, wanted to manipulate me (because I told her she sounded sweeter in Russian so she used that to her advantage in making my life hell) bc my brother stopped speaking at a young age.

The only reason I have this connection is because I’ve never worked harder for anything else in my life. I took years of Russian lit courses (in Russian) at the local uni when I was in high school. Until then I’d only done math and reading (just for fun not for school) in Russian. Having learning and sight disabilities and being expected to keep up with both college and high school class and workloads was overwhelming at times. Like I was 14, this wasn’t an “easy A” as my friends joked, it was a college level literature course. But I loved it like nothing else. It was an oasis of peace during my adolesence just getting to hear my dearest language spoken by both native speakers and those who adopted it just because of their love for it. It was the first time I realized that this aspect of me isn’t shameful. Plus, the college kids treated me like I was such a hotshot because I grew up speaking the language and I was like a tiny 14 year old in a russia Olympic jacket and a bowl cut so that made my life. Just getting to be around places where for once, I understood everything that was being said in the exact emotion it was intended, having my cultural touchstones be the norm and that I got to interact with instantly more people in this language was really special.

Maybe what pissed me off so much is not only that I think it’s wrong, but that I think she’s right. My experience is different from a Russian experience, which is why I never claimed to be Russian even when I was the most Russian person in that classroom. My experience of being Russian (Jewish) (Italian)American is as much a story of love and connection as it is of shame and disconnection. It is the story of pain feeling inadequate to everyone, always. When I was six, kids were already refusing to play with me because their parents told them I was a spy or an enemy (which wtf who parents their kid like that) just because I talked about visiting my family in the summer (which is a normal thing to do) and gd forbid they live in RUSSIA. The bullshit hasn’t stopped since. My entire childhood, my mom was vigilant about who I was allowed to tell about being Russian because of it. I thought Russian a really important language to people here. I thought they cared about us. I thought someone else who didn’t have to care about us, fucking cared about us Russian Jews. How can a fellow Jew, an academic, not understand the inherent pluralism of Jewish and Russian experiences when she’s lived in this country surrounded by Russian Jews her whole life?

And I get it. I’m not technically Russian. I don’t have a Russian passport. I didn’t grow up in Russia and that still means there’s always someone more qualified to answer certain questions. But I didn’t think it was going to be some goyische fucking German. Cuz at least I saw saturated with these types of discussions about Russian politics, not being allowed to voice my opinion bc these are Russian jewish middle aged and older people lol kids don’t have valid opinions to them, but listening intently since infancy. I watched Russian news and tv shows (we didn’t have money for both English and Russian language tv so my mom chose the Russian tv channels) on the rare occasion I sat in front of the tv. I hung around Russian speakers more than English speakers (of my parent’s age and older) for most of my childhood until this year. And it’s not just the language, it’s the culture too. It’s the fact that no one around me shared these cultural touchstones growing up. and I didn’t share their American ones even though I grew up in the US.

But trips to Russia didn’t make me feel understood in the ways I craved it would. My family always commented on how amazingly I spoke Russian «просто без акцента!» (without an accent) *insert kisses from relatives you don’t even know who they are but they know everything about you* so I was always kind of aware that I couldn’t seamlessly fit in there either. Especially when in my mom’s small town, children who played with me had literally never seen someone with my color of skin and told me I looked “dirty” which catalyzed my whole washing my hands till my arms got dry and peeled and being frightened that I wasn’t getting “cleaner” and then getting diagnosed with my second subset of OCD at the age of seven. I had so many fond memories of my mom’s hometown. So much nostalgia. But I also have memories which pain me, like the many times I was chased out of stores or once in a doctor’s office because the person assumed I was Roma because of my appearance (like I said, small town). Things got even worse when the school I went to summer camp/summer classes in my mom’s hometown found out I was JEWISH. Oof. My mom convinced me that I was betraying my culture and my ancestors and alienating myself from my grandmother when I came out to her at 11, when I cut my hair after three years of her daily verbal harassment in my mother tongue (she knew it hurts more like that). She said if I wanted to continue “on this path” I would lose all connection to Russia.... “and you don’t want that, do you?” Suffice it to say, I got the message pretty young that I don’t belong in Russia either.

My whole life I’ve been translating half of my world to the other half of my world. And within each of these worlds I must translate my contexts many fold times more. (My Babushka still doesn’t know why I’m putting “poison” in my body for what she sees as a character flaw because she just doesn’t have the context for what ADHD is and the way I was taught to translate it in Russian is «дефицит внимание» or “deficit of attention/carefulness” which as far as she’s concerned is just an American invention for what could really be solved if I just sat more still.) And this has made my world so much richer to be lucky enough to have two native languages in which I learned how to express myself and gave me two whole realms through which to intimately understand the world and all of its nuances. You gain a family when you speak a language. It’s unlike anything else! It was even more special that I got to add Arabic at 12 and now Hebrew. I’m so lucky. But an inherent downside of being taught world views that conflict with each other in some very fundamental ways is really hard when you’re autistic and have ADHD because you have to juggle not just one set of social cues and norms, but two (or more, shout out to the multilinguals from childhood). It’s hard but it’s important and I’m so lucky that this was my birthright. I just wish people would take two seconds to try and understand. Or at least think about if something they said might make someone else feel like this, especially if they’re jewish. Like to ya it’s not a new thing to be torn in many directions. Even here where it’s the dominant culture, I expected her as someone who lives here and is an academic, she’d be better.

[ladyherenya]

Books read in July

After I read How to Find Love in a Bookshop, I searched the library’s catalogue for other titles containing “bookshop” or “bookstore”. I was curled up in bed with a bad cold at the time, which meant I ended up choosing a bunch of books whose covers or synopses would have, on a different day, put me off. And that worked out rather well!

But afterwards I felt like I didn’t get the right balance between contemporary fiction and fantasy this month.

Favourite cover: Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher.

Still reading: The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert.

Next up: Mort by Terry Pratchett. Maybe The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton.

(Longer reviews and ratings are on LibraryThing. And also Dreamwidth.)

– (they’ve taken away page breaks) –

Things a Map Won’t Show You: stories from Australia & Beyond, edited by Susan La Marca and Pam Macintyre: I borrowed this because I recognised some of the names involved. I liked bits and pieces of it but nothing really stood out. Maybe Peta Freestone’s “Milford Sound”, for the setting. According to the introduction, the stories and poems were chosen “with the curriculum in mind and for their appeal to Year Seven and Eight readers”. That’s a valid reason but I suspect that approach is unlikely to result in a collection that would really appeal to me, not me now and not even when I was a young teenager.

A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II by Elizabeth Wein: This is AMAZING. It is aimed at young people, and I wondered if I’d find the writing style too simplistic, but it was just remarkably accessible. I knew bits about Russia’s history but this gave me a much more comprehensive understanding of the culture and politics these women grew up with, and how Russia came to have three regiments of airwomen at a point in time when other countries wouldn’t let women fly into war. The rest of the book is just as fascinating and surprising. Wein knows how to tell a story.

How to Find Love in a Bookshop by Veronica Henry: This is about Emilia, who inherits her father’s bookshop in a picturesque Cotswold village, and the bookshop’s customers. It doesn’t shy away from Emilia’s grief but otherwise is very much a cosy, optimistic story in which friends are made, relationships are mended, mistakes are overcome and everything turns out all right. Which definitely has its appeal. I wanted just a few more sharp edges -- or else slightly more uncertainty -- so that everyone’s happy endings felt more realistic. (I keep brainstorming ways that could have been managed.) Although I didn’t love this book, there was a lot I liked about it. 

The Masquaraders by Georgette Heyer (narrated by Ruth Sillers): This is ridiculous but still quite entertaining. Either I missed something or Heyer doesn’t really do a great job of explaining why Prudence and her brother Robin need to be in disguise, nor why they’ve decided the best way to do this is by crossdressing. The key to enjoying this book was to just roll with it. Also Prue’s romantic interest is a type Heyer writes so well: perceptive, unflappable, competent, with a sense of humour and an appreciation for level-headedness in others. Sensible people pushed into madcap adventures is something Heyer has a flair for.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle: It’s much more dreamlike than I was expecting, in a similar vein to Patricia A. McKillip’s fantasy. I was emotionally invested only in flickers and bursts, but I appreciated the way it plays with, and comments on, fairytales. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.

The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler: Esme, a British scholarship student studying art history at Columbia, discovers she’s pregnant and gets a job at a quirky secondhand bookshop. I would have found some of her choices -- and the book itself -- terribly frustrating, except I really liked the bookshop and Esme’s narration. I liked her quotes and references and her enthusiasm and her observations, especially those about living in New York and about the shop -- this is a story with a vivid sense of place. Esme’s naivety and optimism is both understandable and believable, and I wanted to see her finally, properly, free of her awful boyfriend. 

The “Happy Ever After Bookshop” books by Annie Darling:

The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts: If I hadn’t already read the second book about the Happy Ever After bookshop and liked it a lot, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading this. The romantic interest annoyed me -- he’s not a bad match for Posy, but I’d find him infuriating in person and I didn’t want to read about him. Fortunately the book is just from Posy’s POV. I enjoyed the Britishness, and the bits about running a bookshop. I particularly liked Posy’s relationship with her younger teenaged brother, whom she has responsibility for. And I was pleased the romance bookshop stocks appropriate YA and mystery titles.

True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop: I was expecting it to turn into the sort of romance which annoys me. To my delight, it did not! Verity loves her noisy family, her nosy friends, her job in a bookshop and reading romances but she believes she isn’t suited to being in a romantic relationship. She reluctantly agrees to a fake-dating situation to avoid friends trying to set her up. I loved the way this story shows Verity being an introvert, and her obvious love for Pride and Prejudice. And this has all the things I like about fake-dating without too much cringe-worthy deception.

Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop: I have less in common with Nina than I do with her colleagues: she’s into make-up, tattoos and Wuthering Heights. But it was interesting seeing why she’s embraced both Wuthering Heights and her own particular style so fiercely -- she’s finding her own path, one that differs from what her conservative working class family expected. Some of the resolutions came about a bit too easily. However, I liked getting a different perspective on the bookshop, I enjoyed bits of her romance with Noah, and I share some of Nina’s fascination with the Bronte sisters.

A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews:  Mattie runs the tearooms attached to the Happy Ever After bookshop. She is delighted about living above the bookshop, but not so impressed about her new flatmate. I’m not a fan of the crazy commercialism of Christmas, but really enjoyed reading about it here -- probably because the story recognises that not everybody loves it. And, given the weather, I was in the mood for something wintry. Other things I liked: the vivid portrayal of the challenges of working “in a customer-facing environment over Christmas”; the details about Mattie’s baking; and the intelligent commentary about romance novels and romantic relationships.

Allegra in Three Parts by Suzanne Daniel: Eleven year old Allegra lives with one grandmother, next door to the other, while her father lives in above the garage. Allegra knows her grandmothers love her, but they are very different. “Sometimes I wish they could just love me less and take what's left over and put it into liking each other a little bit more.” The initial mystery and conflict were slightly stronger than the answers and aftermath. But it’s an interesting portrayal of growing up in Sydney in the 70s, the women’s liberation movement, and of a family dealing with grief. I read it in practically one sitting.

We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett (narrated by Chloe  Cannon): Revna’s father is a traitor. Linné’s father is a general. Revna is discovered protecting herself with illegal magic during an air-raid. Linné is discovered after three years fighting at the front disguised as a boy. They’re both sent to a new women’s Night Raiders regiment, where, if they are to survive this war, they have to learn to fly together. This is tense and captivating -- and nuanced. Magic is wondrous but also confronting, the Union is unjust but contains things worth defending, loyalties are not always predictable, difficult people can become valued friends, and not everything is neatly resolved.

The Way Past Winter by Kiran Millwood Hargrave: In the fifth year of winter, Mila and her sisters wake to find their brother has left. Sanna believes Oskar left them willingly, like their father once did, but Mila is convinced that Oskar was taken by last night’s unsettling visitors -- and is determined to rescue him. I didn’t find this as emotional and compelling as Hargrave’s previous books. I don’t know if that’s because this is a simpler narrative or because I didn’t listen to the audio book -- a good narrator adds liveliness and emotion. But Hargrave’s prose is lovely and I liked the fairytale quality this story has.

Grace After Henry by Eithne Shortall: I really enjoyed Love in Row 27, so I borrowed Shortall’s other novel. After her boyfriend dies, Grace keeps seeing him everywhere. Then she meets a man who looks unnervingly like Henry -- a long-lost relative of Henry’s she did not know about. This story is funny and touching. I didn’t expect it to be so compelling, nor make me so invested in Grace’s relationship with Henry. There’s a strong sense of history and of place -- it was interesting to read about contemporary Dublin. There are unexpected and hopeful developments in Grace’s life. But mostly, it’s just very sad.

Famous in a Small Town by Emma Mills: Sophie loves her friends, her high school’s marching band and her small town. She has an idea for how the band could raise money -- enlisting the help of a famous country singer. I liked Sophie’s deep sense of belonging and how much she cares about things. She’s very kind in a way that is realistic and realistically complicated. Her friends are very supportive, but believably so. They all have flaws and make mistakes and have their secrets. I really enjoyed this story about friendship and summer (and it was a good choice after reading something sad).

Can’t Escape Love by Alyssa Cole: I’ve tried a couple of Cole’s novels and they didn’t appeal to me -- I wouldn’t have considered this novella if I hadn't seen a positive review. It’s fun and fandom-y and diverse. Reggie contacts an old internet acquaintance after she discovers his puzzle livestreams are no longer online. I liked how it’s very clear that Reggie’s disability has a significant impact on her daily life, but has nothing to do with her current problems. And, for Gus, being autistic isn’t ever an obstacle to a relationship with Reggie. I would have liked to read more but this still satisfying.

The Orphans of Raspay, a novella in the World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold: Penric’s ship is captured by pirates and he is thrown in a hold with a couple of young girls from Raspay. As always, I enjoyed Pen’s interactions with Desdemona. I would have enjoyed the story even more had there been more significant character interactions -- the girls aren’t quite old enough to play a very active role in escape plans but are old enough that, in terms of emotional support, they’re not very demanding. I’d like to see Pen challenged more. But this is still a solid adventure. I’m very glad that Bujold hasn’t finished telling stories about Pen and Des.

Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon): Oliver, a twelve year old minor mage with an armadillo familiar, is sent by his village on a perilous journey to the mountains to bring back rain. There’s some dispute over whether this is a children’s book -- Vernon thought it was, her editor was adamant it wasn’t. It feelslike a children’s book to me, even when Oliver has to deal with ghuls, bandits and murderers. (There have always been children’s books which have been too dark and scary for some kids.) The tone is dryly humorous, the armadillo is a delight and I never doubted that Oliver would succeed.

[samosoapsoup]

5 Photographers Capturing Chinese Youth Culture Today

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-photographers-capturing-chinese-youth-culture-today

A new generation of Chinese photographers has come of age during a period of significant economic and social change. Many of them shoot bold images that challenge convention in a time of social and political restrictions. The five photographers featured here closely identify with their subjects’ experiences, exploring identity, displacement, change, and beauty. Each photographer uses their camera to explore their own sense of self within a more collective sense of Chinese identity.

Luo Yang (b. 1984)

Luo Yang’s decade-long portrait series “Girls” (2008–ongoing), rebellion presents itself in the details. Arms raise to reveal delicate armpit hair; nipples softly protrude from wrinkled dresses; and women in sheer fabrics or wearing nothing at all, hold the camera’s gaze with unflinching eye contact.Yang captures identity and sexuality in all of its complexity, eschewing the idealized, sterile beauty promoted in Chinese media. In 2012, Ai Weiwei called the self-taught artist one of the “rising stars of Chinese photography.” Her work has exhibited across Asia and in Berlin, and last year the BBC named her one of the most 100 influential women of 2018.

“I simply present [them] as they really are, and reveal their private and honest moments,” she said of the women she photographs. “They are more independent, brave, and free, daring to challenge the restraints of traditional values cast on them.”Yang feels an intimate connection with the girls, who are both friends and strangers. She began the series as an outlet for her own adolescent emotions. “They all share a certain degree of similarities with myself: The same loneliness, confusions happened in their life,” she explained. “But on the other hand they are more courageous.”As Yang ages, the project does too. She has now captured femininity across generations��millennials born in the ‘80s and ‘90s to Gen Z girls coming of age today. More recently, she has begun exploring the series beyond her native country, photographing girls in Thailand.

Yangkun Shi (b. 1991)

In 2016, when Yangkun Shi returned from his studies in London to the small city of Shangshui in China’s Henan province, he was struck by an intense feeling of melancholy. His modernizing native city felt unfamiliar to him; he couldn’t shake his feelings of homesickness despite being home.Combining his training in documentary photography from University of the Arts London with his fine-art sensibility, Shi began a delicate body of work from his insider-outsider perspective, titled “Solastalgia” (2016–ongoing), a term from philosopher Glenn Albrecht that describes the very feelings he was experiencing.

Shi’s second body of work, “Retrotopia” (2018–ongoing), is similarly guided by the emotional pull of nostalgia. The series examines life in three villages that purport to be “the last bastions of China’s socialism utopia,” Shi explained, as the rest of the country marks four decades since it departed from Maoism and embraced market socialism.“But Mao’s China is a thing of the past, and younger, more individualistic villagers sometimes chafe under the reality of life lived inside of a time capsule,” Shi writes in his artist statement. He most often turns his lens on youth because “they represent the country’s future,” he said, explaining that the gap between his generation and his parents’ often feels hard to bridge. The two series are inextricably linked, as they both explore the uncertainty of China’s rapidly changing social and economic landscape. “‘Retrotopia’ is an exploration of where we come from, and ‘Solastalgia’ is trying to question where we are heading,” he explained.

Leslie Zhang (b. 1992)

In the past couple of years, Leslie Zhang has gained a following for his bold fashion and beauty imagery that combines Eastern and Western influences with the otherworldly. Zhang’s vision is theatrical and idiosyncratic, with contemporary silhouettes meeting traditional details. In one image, a male model in all black leans over a table, weighed down by a blue and white porcelain tea kettle chained to his ear; in another, a model in a vibrant red suit and black velvet gloves embraces a black swan.Zhang has said that he seeks out everyday romances in his images, which have appeared in the Chinese editions of Vogue and T, among many others. His frames are awash in longing, ardor, and poignancy. “Through photography I can create a metaphysical reality of my own,” Zhang said. He believes film lends itself to creating “a romantic visual language,” explaining that the textures of film, the ritual of processing it, and the surprises inherent to analog photography inform his work.

Zhang discovered his love for photography while studying film editing in college. When he was starting out in the fashion industry, Zhang initially tried to make images that felt in line with contemporary international trends, but he felt a lack of connection to his work. He turned to the design aesthetics from his childhood and his own memories as the basis for his visual language. “This doesn’t mean literally recreating what’s been done in China in the past,” he said, “but it’s about having this personal lineage for myself.” Zhang has echoed this sentiment before, telling It’s Nice That in 2018 that he has “the deepest emotional connection” to his memories as an adolescent in his home country. He sifts through those memories to create the careful details of the drama that unfolds in front of his lens.

Ronghui Chen (b. 1989)

Years ago, photographer Ronghui Chen read Tales of the Hulan River (1942), a novel by Xiao Hong set in the frigid landscape of northeastern China. He couldn’t get the scenes of the region out of his mind. As someone who grew up in Lishui, a small town in the southern Zhejiang province, a land of ice and snow held a certain allure.That curiosity would drive his long-term project “Freezing Land” (2016–2019), set in the northeastern countryside, a region once bolstered by its proximity to the Soviet Union, but has since fallen into decline. “This land represented China’s communist roots and authoritarianism,” Chen said. “But now, it has become the most recessionary land in China, with shrinking cities and declining population.”

Chen sought out subjects growing up in this climate, using the social media app Kuaishou to locate people willing to open up about their lives. He found that each of them were experiencing a sense of uncertainty and probed whether they would they leave for a bigger city in search of new opportunities, or remain in a city mired by history?It’s a decision familiar to Chen, who left Lishui to study photojournalism in the city of Nanchang. “Like so many other young Chinese, this has left me with an unstable sense of self,” he said. “Now that I’ve left, I feel out of place in both the city and countryside.”Chen identified so strongly with the young people he met that it gave his work a new sense of purpose. “I’m not just photographing the lost ‘Chinese Dream’ on this freezing northeastern land,” he explained, “but also the uncertainty we young people, as individuals, are facing under today’s collectivism in China.”

Ye Fan (b. 1986)

When Shanghai-born Ye Fan spent a year in America during a high school cultural exchange program, she repeatedly encountered the stereotype that Chinese girls are shy and submissive. Now as a photographer, she challenges that notion through the series, “Her” (2017–ongoing), which explores a more nuanced view of modern Chinese femininity.“Individuality is not bound by where you were born,” Fan said. “We are so unique in our own way and our desire to express it is universal.”

Fan is currently living in New York after a five-year stint in entertainment PR in China. She took a photography workshop at Columbia University in 2016 that set her on her current path. Photography has helped her understand the complexity of her own personality. Fan said she has been told her entire life that she is too sensitive, but she has come to appreciate that side of herself. Her subjects, like herself, were born in China but came abroad to study art or design. “We all found a piece of home in New York,” she said. She wants each young woman to be themselves, but she helps nudge them outside of their comfort zones. Junyi, a painter, showed up in a traditional silk qipaodress; she and Fan decided to shoot in a pool. The tranquil image shows a polished girl in a carefree moment, her eyes closed as she floats in her gown.Fan plans to continue the series around her native country. “It has been a mind-blowing experience, to see so many different personalities and individualities [with] their own way of illustrating youth and femininity through my lens,” she said.

[evilelitest2]

100 Days of Trump Day 56: Animal Farm

Welcome back to 100 Days of Trump where we try to explain WTF happens in 2016 through 100 Works.  And fucking Animal Farm, this is almost too obvious but I think it needs to be talked about anyways.  First off, let me make this clear right away, George Orwell was a socialist, when ever rightists bring him up, rub it in their faces that George Orwell was tremendously left wing and anti capitalist, he just also happens to be a critic of communism.  And that is good, the left needs to be much critical of communism and other Utopian leftist movements and we will get into that more in later posts (episodes?  I don’t know what to call this).  

   Ok so beyond that, I am assuming all of you have read it, go read it, its a classic for a very good reason, why is it relevant to us today, why is the rise of a far right leader related to the rise of a communist dictatorship?  Well totalitarianism looks similar no matter what system you are in because it relies on the same basic urges, and takes advantage of the same internal ideological tricks that you see everywhere else. The actions of the characters really do serve as examples of ‘What behavior lets you be taken advantage of by dictators” and it applies to both the left and the Right 

Lets go through a few

1) Love of Simplicity.  

A lot of people ideologically seem to believe that simplicity is a virtue, and I’m not talking Taoist here. People think the Tax Code should be simple, people think national debt should be simple, foreign policy, the military, Healthcare, religion, race relations, immigration etc should be simple, that these things are just being needlessly complicated by “EVIL” goverment types for its own sake.  And while that does sometimes happen as we saw in Yes Prime Minister, over all the fact remains things will never be simple, life isn’t simple, it never will be, and anyone telling you is taking advantage of you.  This desire for simplicity “Four Legs good, two legs bad” is evident in Trump’s supporters, they really want these complicated problems to have a simple problem with a simple solution?  Flat Tax, Border Wall, Bomb ISIS, Muslim Ban, the Natioanl Debt, all of this stuff is coming from a place of “Lets just done one simple thing and the problem goes away right?  Well no....no it doesn’t, none of those issue are remotely solved by any of those solutions because they are simple.  For example, most illegal migrants wouldn’t be stopped by a wall anyways.  The problem with a desire for simplicity is that if you have it strong enough, people can take a simple truth and alter it easily, like “Four legs good, two legs better”.  Things are going to be complicated.  The left does this too btw, like a lot, my tumblrs original goal was challenging the left’s love of simplistic reductionist definitions.  LIke “Racism equals power plus prejudice” or “America are the real terrorists” or of course thinking because capitalism is bad that means communism is good right?  We don’t live in a simple world, we never have and we never will, until you accept that you are what is politically known as a sucker. 

2) Pandering 

The fact is people like to be told that they are special and that they are in fact the most correct, that their way of seeing things is totally correct and true, and everybody else needs to come around to how great they are.  And when you have a politician come to you and says “yes, guess what, you are great, you have it totally wrong” most people indulge that rather than questioning it uncritical.  Obviously the Republicans have perfected that to a fucking art form, the whole “Rural Smalltown American”, “Good Christian Culture” and the entire “Real American” nonsense (you know, a minority of the country).  And we really see this with the whole “American Christian notion”  I like Christianity but the Bible Belt form is a fucking perversion because it isn’t about an actual ideology or theology, its about being smugly superior to the outsiders, its turned into a fucking cultural identity.  And if you just say the right phrases or close enough (Two Corinthians) then they will vote for you despite how many women you sexually assault.   ANd of course this is totally true among the left as well, I mean that is where these bullshit cult like left wing pseudo hippies conmen come from telling liberals that Vaccines are bad, that GMOS are this evil thing inherently (again see #1).  BTW, this is why Neoliberals centrists hacks keep being able to win primaries and then lose elections, because they will utter the words without any substance behind them.  

3) The Leader is your Friend 

“Napoleon is Always Right”.  Mindless support of a leader is something most of us laugh at as ‘those people so stupid” when talking about North Korea or the Soviet Union, but we do it all the fucking time, because when we like somebody and feel he understands us, we don’t like to see that person get criticized.  Like you know...Obama.  I like Obama, I like that he is a huge dork, I like how charming he is, I find myself thinking back on statements he’s made when i’m feeling down, I internally enjoy it when Obama does something silly and when ever he stands up to somebody I don’t like I go “FUCK YEAH, OBAMA FOR THE WIN”.  And when somebody says “Dude, Obama’s approach to TPP or his Drone Policy is really fucked up” I instinctively try to rationalize it, I either work hard to look at things from his perspective and try to explain it using his logic, which i’d never do for a Republican, or I try to distant him from the thing I don’t like, “Oh well Drone Strikes is more the military industrial complex” or “Oh well the NSA overreach started under Bush anyways” because I want to like Obama and make him an extension of my own mental identity.  A lot of Russian people do this with Putin.  Because the thing you should do, aka “I really like Obama as a person and I love all of these aspects of him while these other things are really fucked up” is hard.  People don’t like to think complexly of their leaders.  This is even more difficult if you have an identity connection to the person, African Americans have a lot invested in Obama, women, particularly women over 45 have a lot in Hillary Clinton, and that personal identification makes it difficult.  And before you think i’m opposed to identity politics oh wait look, Donald Trump, who does the same thing but for white men who are clearly the most oppressed people in the world...

That was sarcastic btw.   But no i’m not calling Clinton or Obama authoritarian, I”m talking about the psychological effect here.  

 And that is what Trump is relying upon for his core audience, that people feel like they know him, he is that one jackass at the bard who everybody thinks is kind of a prick but says what they are all thinking and ultimately stands up for them against the “Bad People”.  And that is how you get this sort of mental assumption of protecting a single person, because any blow to them is by extension a blow to you.  

4) The ENEMY/The Victim

Key to the creation of this world view is “The enemy” this vague nebulous external force of BADNESS that exists to do the bad things to you and are responsible for everything bad.  Because people love simplicity and are you know...stupid they want all the bad things in their life to be linked.  Terrorism is bad and so is Reaganomics corporate capitalism?  THEY MUST BE LINKED?  I don’t like atheists and I don’t like Obama?  HE MUST BE AN ATHEIST.  The notion of all evil things being part of one vast giant “other” (often just called Jewish because of course they are) is extremely easy to take advantage of, because it allows the leader to attack the universal enemy.  This is much better if you happen to be legitimately persecuted in some way, and that persecution justifies all of your behavior.  And in order to connect all these things, you get into conspiracy theory logic After all, I suffered, therefore anything I do is acceptable, particularly when THOSE Guys are out to get you.  And this is why this is so dangerous as a concept, because often times there is a group that is out to get you, just not a single nebulous one.  The left totally falls into this of course, which is why internationalist is so difficult pitting poor whites against blacks is an age old tactic of the rich and when the Left gets really crazy when there is an external force challenging them.  When the entire world is “US vs. them” there is no room for nuance, and the whole world gets toxic real quick and hey look, Maoism.  They will always appeal to the time when we fought the great battle and overthrew the great threat, and link what is happening now with that previous great conflict.  

 This is especially true of Say Israel, who are fighting against legitimate anti antisemitism and external threats in such a way that makes the whole conflict gets so demented that the ISraeli Far Right are siding with actual Neo Nazis. 

5) Nostalgia/Cultural Symbols

As we discussed in Bob Roberts, the right survives by co-opting other concepts, because their core principles are usually things people can’t really get behind, so they need to take advantage of existing cultural effects to justify and spread their ideology.  This is almost always be common cultural symbols we can get behind, and then they will use “defending” that thing to justify their behavior.  Founding Fathers, Patriotism, the American Flag, Christianity, Capitalism, all things that are far more complicated and not inherently bad that are kinda tainted because of this association.  This is why Gamergate calls its movement “Ethics in Games Journalism” because that rhetoric allows them to gain adherents even if it is paper thin.  Never give blind loyalty to something for its own sake and never trust nostalgia or sentimentalism, because those are the avenues where somebody will take advantage of you.  

   Animal Farm is a story about how something good is co-opted and morphed into something evil because of people’s desire for naive optimism, and when it comes to politics, you don’t have the luxury to look at things uncritically, because if you don’t you will find yourself made into glue. 

Basically what i’m saying is we should be like Benjamin not Boxer 

This...don’t do this 

[alliluyevas]

I was asked again for Soviet history book recs (as opposed to my anti-rec of Simon Montefiore hhhh) so I rediscovered this list and I have more stuff to add that I’ve read since I wrote the original post.

Familiar Strangers: Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire by Erik Scott. This is a really interesting book about the experience of Georgians in the Soviet Union outside of the Georgian SSR and the influence of Georgian culture on mainstream Soviet culture. I read it for my research paper on Soviet ethnic restaurants and there’s a ton of fascinating information about food culture and culinary history, but also lots of other information about cultural history as well as the influence of Georgians on Soviet politics. (Not just Stalin, but lots about Stalin as well, and placing these people in their ethnic and national context). If, like me, you’re interested in history about immigration and ethnic minorities, or you’re sick of people seeing “Soviet” and “Russian” as the same thing, this is a good book for you!’

Now we get into Gender. Yay.

Women, The State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life 1917-1936 by Wendy Goldman. This book covers some of the same ground as The Dictatorship of Sex featured above, but has different arguments and views things through a different lens. Goldman is a really accomplished historian and the book is super well written and researched. I really want to read her books about Stalinist terror and repression as well.

Bolshevik Women by Barbara Clements. This book takes a more political angle than the other women’s history books recced above—it focuses on women in the Bolshevik movement, specifically those who joined what would become the Communist Party before 1920; that is, before or shortly after the revolution. The author looks at the stories of different female Communists of varying historical renown, as well as Bolshevik women as a whole, communist women’s organizations, and demographics. There’s also a lot of really interesting stuff about women during the purges, including information about female NKVD officers. Until I read this book, I literally didn’t even know there WERE any female NKVD officers. (Not many, but it was still interesting and rather disturbing to read about).

Kremlin Wives by Larissa Vasilyeva. This book (originally published in Russian, but available in English translation) focuses on the stories of women married to important Soviet politicians, primarily during the Stalin era but also before and after. It’s a really fascinating combination of political and domestic history, and her profiles of these women feel really vital and complex. She also portrays her subjects with a lot of sympathy and nuance, which was really moving and refreshing because I’ve seen some hot misogynyistic garbage out there regarding this topic. She also puts in some of her own personal perspective, especially when she talks about interviewing some of her subjects and what the interview process was like, and its actually really interesting to hear her take on it, especially since she admits she’s not entirely objective and doesn’t try to pretend her subjective opinions are historical fact like Certain Other Historians. I do want to provide a content warning because this book is pretty dark, and several of the profiles discuss sexual violence and intimate partner abuse at length.

Hi! What books would you recommend to someone looking to read more about Soviet History?

*screams*

okay so! You should read The History of The Russian Revolution by Trotsky which is like really interesting as both an actual history of the revolution and also like…a primary source document about the mentality of the participants.

A couple good books I’ve read for class include:

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynne Viola which is about deportations of whole families (and sometimes whole villages) of undesirable populations to Siberia and like these prison-villages that were constructed, which really isnt talked about as much because people focus more on the labor camps but this is like…very similar but also different in other ways. It’s a really well-done book IMO.

The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses by Frances Bernstein which is about policy and education in the early USSR related to sexual health and gender relations, and it’s REALLY interesting and full of fascinating vignettes.

Also, I read Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale over winter break which is about Lenin (and a lot of other revolutionaries) traveling into Russia after the February Revolution in the (in)famous sealed train through Germany. It’s kind of like…microhistory-esque and it’s really interesting to see such a close take at a small situation and all the people involved in it.

Also, if you’re into biography at all, I am currently reading William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era which is like…really good.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: It often appears that “true Afghanistan” is not here in Kabul and not in Jalalabad or Heart either; not in the ancient villages, which anxiously cling to the steep mountainsides. Many foreigners and even Afghans are now convinced that the “true” Afghanistan is only what is being shown on the television screens, depicted in magazines, or what is buried deep in the archives and libraries somewhere in London, New York or Paris. It is tempting to think that the country could be only understood from a comfortable distance, from the safety of one’s living room or from those books and publications decorating dusty bookshelves and coffee tables all over the world. “Afghanistan is dangerous,” they say. “It is too risky to travel there. One needs to be protected, escorted, equipped and insured in order to function in that wild and lawless country even for one single day, or just a few hours.” When it comes to Afghanistan, conditioned Western ‘rational brains’ of tenure or emeritus professors (or call them the ‘regime’s intellectual gatekeepers’) often get engaged, even intertwined with those pathologically imaginative minds of the upper class ‘refugees’, the ‘elites’, and, of course, their offspring. After all, crème de la crème ‘refugees’ speak perfect English; they know the rules and nuances of the game. The results of such ‘productive interaction’ are then imprinted into countless books and reports. Books of that kind become, in turn, what could be easily defined as the ‘official references’, a ‘certified way’ to how our world perceives a country like Afghanistan. Their content is being quoted and recycled. How often I heard, from the old veteran opinion makers (even those from the ‘left’) – people that I actually used to respect in the past: The Soviet era in Afghanistan was, of course, terrible, but at least many girls there had access to the education… It is no secret that ‘many girls had access to education’ in those distant days, but was it really “terrible”, that era? Was it “of course, terrible?” Baseless clichés like this are actually shaping ‘public opinion’, and can be much more destructive than the hardcore propaganda. Most of those old gurus never set foot in Afghanistan, during the Soviet era or before, let alone after. All their ‘experience’ is second or third-hand, constructed mainly on sponging up bitterness from those who betrayed their own country and have been collaborating with the West, or at least on the confusion and mental breakdowns of their children. Based on such recycled unconfirmed ‘facts’, bizarre theories are born. According to them, Afghanistan is ‘officially’ wrecked; it is hopelessly corrupt; it is beyond salvation and repair. It is ‘so divided, ethnically and otherwise’, that it can never function again as one entity. Then come liberals, and the children of corrupt Afghan diplomats and exiled ‘elites’, who commonly justify their passivity by blaming the entire world for the destruction of their nation: “every country in the world just wants to harm Afghanistan, take shamelessly advantage of it.” Naturally, if everybody is responsible, than nobody truly is. Therefore, as expected, ‘the grand conclusion’ is –  “There is absolutely no hope.” Everyone who can is trying to leave; who in his or her right mind would want to dwell in such mayhem?” Let’s just write the entire place off! Chapter closed. One of the greatest cultures on Earth is finished. Nothing can be done about it. Goodbye, Afghanistan! Ciao, bella! For some, especially for those who left the country and slammed the door, it is a tempting and ‘reassuring’ way of looking at the state of things. It justifies their earlier decision. If one accepts such views, than nothing has to be done, because no matter what, things would never improve, anyway. For many, especially for those who are benefiting (even making careers) from doing absolutely nothing to save Afghanistan, such an approach and such theories are actually perfect. Very little of it matters to them, that almost all of this is total rubbish! ***** I never saw any of those professors from the MIT or Cornell University anywhere near the dusty roads cutting through Samar Khel or Charikar. I never saw any reporters from the Western mass media outlets here, in the deepest villages that keep changing hands between Taliban and the government forces, either. If they were here, I’d definitely spot them, as they tend to travel ‘in style’, like some buffoons from bygone eras: wearing ridiculous helmets, bulletproof vests, and PRESS insignias on all imaginable and unimaginable parts of their bodies, while being driven around in armored vehicles, often even with a full military escort. It would be quite difficult to talk to Afghan people looking like that. There is not much one could actually even see from such an angle and perspective, but that’s the only one they are choosing to have, that is if they come here at all. ***** Let me back-track a bit: in case my readers in the West or elsewhere have never heard about Samar Khel. Well, it is a dusty town not far from Jalalabad, a former ‘grave’ for the Soviet forces and the National Afghan Army. During the “Soviet era”, the US and the Saudi-backed Mujahedeen used to fire between 500 and 1,000 missiles from here, all directly towards the city of Jalalabad, day after day. It is very hard to imagine what went on and what went wrong in Afghanistan during the 1980’s, without feeling that 430C heat of the desert, without chewing dust, without facing those bare, hostile mountains, and without speaking to people who used to live here during ‘those days’, as well as people who have been existing, barely surviving here now. It is also absolutely impossible to understand the Soviet Union and its ‘involvement’ in Afghanistan, without driving through the countryside and all of a sudden spotting in some ancient and god-forsaken village, a mighty and durable water duct built by Soviet engineers several decades ago, with electricity towers and high voltage wires still proudly spanning above. Soviet water pipe in the village, Nangarhar Province ***** By now I know that I don’t want to write another academic book. I wrote two of them, one about Indonesia and one about that enormous sprawl of water dotted with fantastic but devastated islands and atolls of the South Pacific – “Oceania”. To write academic books is time consuming and it is, in many ways, ‘selfish’. The true story gets buried under an avalanche of tedious facts and numbers, under footnotes and recycled quotes. Once such a book is read and returned to its place on a shelf, no one is really inspired or outraged, no one is terrified and no one is ready to build barricades and fight. But most academic books are never even read from cover to cover. I see no point in writing books that wouldn’t inspire people to raise flags, to fight for their country and humanity. I don’t work in Afghanistan in order to compile indexes and footnotes. I am there because the country itself is a victim of the most brutal and ongoing imperialist destruction in modern history. As an internationalist, I’m not here only to document; I’m here to accuse and to confront the venomous Western colonialist narrative frontally. Afghanistan is bleeding, assaulted and terribly injured. Therefore it deserves to be fought for and not just to be analyzed and described. No cold and detached historic accounts, no texts written from a safe distance, can help this beautiful country to stand on its own feet, to regain its pride and hope, and to fly as it used to in the not so distant past. It doesn’t need more and more nihilism. On the contrary, it is thirsting for optimism, for new friends, for hope. Not all countries are the same. Even now, Afghanistan has friends, true friends, no matter how much this fact is being obscured by the Western propagandists, no matter how much pro-Western Afghan elites are trying to prove otherwise. ***** This is not what you are supposed to be reading. All remembrances of the “Soviet Era” in Afghanistan have been boxed and then labeled as “negative”, even “toxic”. No discussion on the topic is allowed in ‘polite circles’, at least in the West and in Afghanistan itself. Afghanistan is where the Soviet Union was tricked into, and Afghanistan is where the Communist superpower received its final blow. ‘The victory of capitalism over communism’, the official Western narrative shouted. A ‘temporary destruction of all progressive alternatives for our humanity’, replied others, but mostly under their breath. After the horrific, brutal and humiliating period of Gorbachev/Yeltsin, Russia shrunk both geographically and demographically, while going through indescribable agony. It hemorrhaged; it was bathing in its own excrement, while the West celebrated its temporary victory, dancing in front of the world map, envisioning the re-conquest of its former colonies. But in the end Russia survived, regained its bearings and dignity, and once again became one of the most important countries on Earth, directly antagonistic to the global Western imperialist designs. Soviet tanks cemetery Afghanistan has never recovered. After the last Soviet combat troops left the country in 1989, it bled terribly for years, consumed by a brutal civil war. Its progressive government had to face the monstrous terror of the Western and Saudi-backed Mujahedeen, with individuals like Osama bin Laden in command of the jihadi genocide. Socialists, Communists, secularists as well as almost all of those who were educated in the former Soviet Union or Eastern Block countries, were killed, exiled, or muzzled for decades. Most of those who settled in the West simply betrayed; went along with the official Western narrative and dogma. Even those individuals who still claimed to be part of the left, repeated like parrots, their pre-approved fib: Perhaps the Soviet Union was not as bad as the Mujahedeen, Taliban, or even the West, but it was really bad enough. I heard these lines in London and elsewhere, coming from several mouths of the corrupt Afghan ‘elites’ and their children. From the beginning I was doubtful. And then my work, my journeys to and through Afghanistan began. I spoke to dozens of people all over the country, doing exactly what I was discouraged to do: driving everywhere without an escort or protection, stopping in the middle of god-forsaken villages, entering fatal city slums infested with narcotics, approaching prominent intellectuals in Kabul, Jalalabad and elsewhere. “Where are you from?” I was asked on many occasions. “Russia,” I’d reply. It was a gross simplification. I was born in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, but an incredible mixture of Chinese, Russian, Czech and Austrian blood circles through my veins. Still, the name “Russia” came naturally to me, in the middle of Afghan deserts and deep gorges, especially in those places where I knew that my life was hanging on a thin thread. If I were to be allowed to utter one last word in this life, “Russia” was what I wanted it to be. Author driving through Afghanistan But after my declaration, the faces of the Afghan people would soften, unexpectedly and suddenly. “Welcome!” I’d hear again and again. An invitation to enter humble homes would follow: an offer to rest, to eat, or to just drink a glass of water. ‘Why?’ I often wondered. “Why?” I finally asked my driver and interpreter, Mr. Arif, who became my dear friend. “It’s because in this country, Afghans love Russian people,” he replied simply and without any hesitation. “Afghans love Russians?” I wondered. “Do you?” “Yes,” he replied, smiling. “I do. Most of our people here do.” ***** Two days later I was sitting inside an armored UNESCO Land Cruiser, talking to a former Soviet-trained engineer, now a simple driver, Mr. Wahed Tooryalai. He allowed me to use his name; he had no fear, just accumulated anger, which he obviously wanted to get out of his system: When I sleep, I still sometimes see the former Soviet Union in my dreams. After that, I wake up and feel happy for one entire month. I remember everything I saw there, until now… I wanted to know what really made him so happy ‘there’? Mr. Wahed did not hesitate: People! They are so kind. They are welcoming… Russians, Ukrainians… I felt so much at home there. Their culture is exactly like ours. Those who say that Russians ‘occupied’ Afghanistan have simply sold out. The Russians did so much for Afghanistan: they built entire housing communities like ‘Makroyan’, they built factories, even bakeries. In places such as Kandahar, people are still eating Russian bread… I recalled the Soviet-era water pipes that I photographed all over most of the humble Afghan countryside, as well as the elaborate water canals in and around cities like Jalalabad. “There is so much propaganda against the Soviet Union,” I said. “Only the Mujahedeen and the West hate Russians,” Mr. Wahed explained. “And those who are serving them.” Then he continued: Almost all poor Afghan people would never say anything bad about Russians. But the government people are with the West, as well as those Afghan elites who are now living abroad: those who are buying real estate in London and Dubai, while selling their own country…those who are paid to ‘create public opinion’. His words flowed effortlessly; he knew precisely what he wanted to say, and they were bitter, but it was clearly what he felt: Before and during the Soviet era, there were Soviet doctors here, and also Soviet teachers. Now show me one doctor or teacher from the USA or UK based in the Afghan countryside! Russians were everywhere, and I still even remember some names: Lyudmila Nikolayevna… Show me one Western doctor or nurse based here now. Before, Russian doctors and nurses were working all over the country, and their salaries were so low… They spent half on their own living expenses, and the other half they distributed amongst our poor… Now look what the Americans and Europeans are doing: they all came here to make money! I recall my recent encounter with a Georgian combatant, serving under the US command at the Bagram base. Desperate, he recalled his experience to me: Before Bagram I served at the Leatherneck US Base, in Helmand Province. When the Americans were leaving, they even used to pull out concrete from the ground. They joked: “When we came here, there was nothing, and there will be nothing after we leave…” They prohibited us from giving food to local children. What we couldn’t consume, we had to destroy, but never give to local people. I still don’t understand, why? Those who come from the US or Western Europe are showing so much spite for the Afghan people! What a contrast! Mr. Wahed recalled how the Soviet legacy was abruptly uprooted: After the Taliban era, we were all poor. There was hunger; we had nothing. Then the West came and began throwing money all around the place. Karzai and the elites kept grabbing all that they could, while repeating like parrots: “The US is good!” Diplomats serving Karzai’s government, the elites, they were building their houses in the US and UK, while people educated in the Soviet Union couldn’t get any decent jobs. We were all blacklisted. All education had to be dictated by the West. If you were educated in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, East Germany or Bulgaria, they’d just tell you straight to your face: Out with you, Communist! At least now we are allowed to at least get some jobs… We are still pure, clean, never corrupt! “Do people still remember?” I wonder. Of course they do! Go to the streets, or to a village market. Just tell them: “How are you my dear?” in Russian. They’d immediately invite you to their homes, feed you, embrace you… I tried a few days later, in the middle of the market… and it worked. I tried in a provincial town, and it worked again. I finally tried in a Taliban-infiltrated village some 60 kilometers from Kabul, and there it didn’t. But I still managed to get away. ***** I met Mr. Shakar Karimi in Pole Charkhi Village. A local patriarch, he used to be a district chief in Nangarhar Province. I asked him, what the best system ever implemented in modern Afghanistan was? First he spoke about the Khan dynasty, but then referred to a left-wing Afghan leader, who was brutally tortured and murdered by Taliban after they entered Kabul in 1996: If they’d let Dr. Najib govern in peace, that would have been the best for Afghanistan! I asked him about the Soviet invasion in 1979. They came because they were given wrong information. The first mistake was to enter Afghanistan. The second, fatal mistake was to leave. “What was the main difference between the Russians and Westerners during their engagement in Afghanistan?” The Russian people came predominately to serve, to help Afghanistan. The relationship between Russians and Afghans was always great. There was real friendship and people were interacting, even having parties together, visiting each other. I didn’t push him further; didn’t ask what was happening now. It was just too obvious. “Enormous walls and high voltage wires,” would be the answer. Drone zeppelins, weapons everywhere and an absolute lack of trust… and the shameless division between the few super rich and the great majority of the desperately poor… the most depressed country on the Asian continent. ***** Later I asked my comrade Arif, whether all this was really true? “Of course!” He shouted, passionately. “100% true. The Russians built roads, they built homes for our people, and they treated Afghans so well, like their brothers. The Americans never did anything for Afghanistan, almost nothing. They only care about their own benefits.” If there would be a referendum right now, on a simple question: ‘do you want Afghanistan to be with Russia or with the United States, the great majority would vote for Russia, never for the US or Europe. And you know why? I’m Afghan: when my country is good, then I’m happy. If my country is doing bad, then I suffer! Most people here, unless they are brainwashed or corrupted by the Westerners, know perfectly well what Russia did for this country. And they know how the West injured our land. ***** Of course, this is not what every single Afghan person thinks, but most of them definitely do. Just go and drive to each and every corner of the country, and ask. You are not supposed to, of course. You are told to be scared to come here, to roam through this “lawless” land. And you are not supposed to go directly to the people. Instead you are expected to recycle the writings of toothless, cowardly academics, as well as servile mass media reports. If you are liberal, you are at least expected to say: “there is no hope, no solution, no future.” At Goga Manda village, the fighting between the Taliban and government troops is still raging. All around the area, the remnants of rusty Soviet military hardware can be found, as well as old destroyed houses from the “Soviet era” battles. The Taliban is positioned right behind the hills. Its fighters attack the armed forces of Afghanistan at least once a month. Right before Taliban moved in Almost 16 years after the NATO invasion and consequent occupation of the country, this village, as thousands of other villages in Afghanistan, has no access to electricity, and to drinking water. There is no school within walking distance, and even a small and badly equipped medical post is far from here, some 5 kilometers away. Here, an average family of 6 has to survive on US$130 dollars per month, and that’s only if some members are actually working in the city. I ask Mr. Rahmat Gul, who used to be a teacher in a nearby town, whether the “Russian times” were better. He hesitated for almost one minute, and then replied vaguely: When the Russians were here, there was lots of shooting… It was real war… People used to die. During the jihad period, the Mujahedeen were positioned over there… they were shooting from those hills, while Soviet tanks were stationed near the river. Many civilians were caught in the crossfire. As I got ready to ask him more questions, my interpreter began to panic: Let’s go! Taliban is coming. He’s always calm. When he gets nervous, I know it is really time to run. We ran; just stepping on the accelerator and driving at breakneck speed towards the main road. ***** Before we parted, Mr. Wahed Tooryalai grabbed my hand. I knew he wanted to say something essential. I waited for him to formulate it. Then it came, in rusty but still excellent Russian: Sometimes I feel so hurt, so angry. Why did Gorbachev abandon us? Why? We were doing just fine. Why did he leave us? If he hadn’t betrayed us, life in Afghanistan would be great. I wouldn’t have to be a UN driver… I used to be the deputy director of an enormous bread factory, with 300 people working there: we were building our beloved country, feeding it. I hope Putin will not leave us. Then he looked at me, straight into my eyes, and suddenly I got goose bumps as he spoke, and my glasses got foggy: Please tell Mr. Putin: do hold our hand, as I’m now holding yours. Tell him what you saw in my country; tell him that we Afghans, or at least many of us, are still straight, strong and honest people. All this will end, and we will send the Americans and Europeans packing. It will happen very soon. Then please come and stand by us, by true Afghan patriots! We are here, ready and waiting. Come back, please. ***** A son of the super elite Afghan ‘exiles’ living in London, once ‘shouted’ at me, via Whatsapp, after I dared to criticize one of the officially-recognized gurus of the Western anti-communist left, who happened to be his religiously admired deity: I’m completely amazed that you’d do such a thing. Then again, you’re Russian… And Russians held a strange superiority complex about dominating the whole Asian & African continents – even when nobody invited or asked them to. Historical examples are plenty… Don’t go to a country to report about what’s actually going on when you can’t even speak the language! This was his tough verdict on Russia and on my work; a verdict of ‘Afghan man in London’, who never even touched work in his entire life, being fully sustained by his morally corrupted family. He never travelled much, except when his father took him on one of the official diplomatic visits. He has been drinking, taking drugs and hating everything that fights, that defies the Empire. From President Duterte in the Philippines, to Maduro in Venezuela, and Assad in Syria. After he was taken out of Afghanistan at an extremely early age, he never set foot on its soil. All of his knowledge was accumulated ‘second-hand’, but he is quick to pass endless moral judgments, and he is actually taken seriously by one of the most influential and famous ‘opposition’ figures in the West. It is because he is an Afghan, after all, and because he has a perfect English accent, and his ‘conclusions’ are ‘reasonable’, at least to some extent acceptable by the regime, and therefore trustworthy. He and others like him know perfectly well when to administer the required dose of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian sentiments, or when to choose well-tolerated anarcho-syndicalism over true revolutionary fervor. Again in London, a lady from an Afghan diplomatic circle, who still takes pride in being somehow left-leaning (despite her recent history of serving the West), recalled with nostalgia and boasting pride: Once when I got sick, I travelled with my husband from Kabul to Prague, for medical treatment. It was in 80’s, and we took with us 5,000 dollars. You know, in those days in Czechoslovakia this was so much money! Our friends there never saw so much cash in their lives. We really had great time there. I listened politely and thought: ‘Damn, in those days, my two Czech uncles were building sugar mills, steel factories and turbines for developing countries like Syria, Egypt, Lebanon. I’m not sure whether they also worked in Afghanistan, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. It was their internationalist duty and they were hardly making US$500 per month. The salary of my father, a leading nuclear scientist, who was in charge of the safety of VVR power plant reactors, was at that time (and at the real exchange) well under US$200 a month. These were very honest, hard-working people, doing their duty towards humanity. And then someone came from Kabul, from the capital of one of the poorest countries in Asia, recipient of aid and internationalist help from basically all Soviet Block countries, and blows 5.000 bob in just a few days!’ In those days, socialist Czechoslovakia was helping intensively, various revolutionary and anti-colonialist movements, all over the world. Even Ernesto Che Guevara was treated there, between his campaign in Congo, and his final engagement in Bolivia. But the lady did not finish, yet: Once we crossed the border and travelled to the Soviet Union by land. You cannot imagine the misery we encountered in the villages, across the border! Life was much tougher there than on our side. Of course Moscow was different: Moscow was the capital, full of lights, truly impressive… Was that really so? Or was this official narrative that has been injected through the treasonous elites into the psyche of both Afghans and foreigners? I listened, politely. I like stories, no matter from which direction they are coming. I took mental notes. Then, back in Afghanistan, I asked Mr. Shakar Karimi point blank: You were travelling back and forth, between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union. Was life in the Afghan countryside better than in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan? He stared at me, shocked. When my question finally fully sank into his brain, he began laughing: Soviet villages were so much richer, there could not be any comparison. They had all necessary facilities there, from electricity to water, schools and medical posts, even public transportation: either train or at least a bus. No one could deny this, unless they’d be totally blind or someone would pay them not to see! Of course Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, was totally different story: it was a huge and very important Soviet city, with theaters, museums, parks, hospitals and universities. But even the villages were, for us, shockingly wealthy. Culture at both sides of the border was, however, similar. And while the Soviets were engaged here in Afghanistan, things began developing at our side of the border, too. But who would listen to Mr. Shakar Karimi from Pole Charkhi Village, on the outskirts of Kabul. He hardly spoke English, and he had no idea how to be diplomatic and ‘acceptable’ to Londoners or New Yorkers. And what he was saying was not what was expected from the Afghans to say. During my previous trip to Afghanistan, over the phone from Kabul, I suggested to my friend, another ‘elite’ Afghan exile, that the next time she should come with me, at least for a few days, in order to reconnect, to breath the air of the city that she has been claiming she missed so desperately, for so many years. Reply was curt, but somehow predictable: Me, coming back like this; incognito? You don’t understand, my family is so important! When I finally go back, it will be a big, big deal! It is very strange, but Afghans that I know from Afghanistan are totally different from those I meet in Europe and North America. So are Afghans who are going back, regularly, to their beloved country, and who are ‘connected’, even engaged. In Rome, I met Afghan Princess Soraya. I was invited to Italy by several left-wing MP’s representing 5 Stelli (‘5 Star Movement’) and during our lunch together, when learning about my engagement in Afghanistan, they exclaimed: “You have to meet ‘our’ Afghan Princess!” They called her on a mobile phone. She was in her 60s, but immediately she jumped on her bicycle and pedaled to the Parliament area in order to meet me. She was shockingly unpretentious, and endlessly kind. With her, nothing was a ‘big deal’. “Come meet me in the evening in the old Jewish Ghetto,” she suggested. “There will be an opening of a very interesting art exhibition there, in one of the galleries.” We met again, in the evening. She was very critical of the occupation of her country by the NATO forces. She had no fear, nothing to hide. She had no need to play political games. I’m going back to Kandahar, in couple of weeks. Please let me know when you are going back to my country. I’ll arrange things for you. We’ll show you around Kandahar. ***** In the meantime, I got used to Afghanistan; to its terrain, its stunning beauty, to its bitter cold in the winter and stifling heat of the summers, to its curtness, its exaggerated politeness and even to its hardly bearable roughness, which always surfaces at least once in a while. But I never got used to all of those upper-class ‘refugees’, people who have left Afghanistan permanently; to those who later betrayed, and then betrayed again, spreading false information about their country, serving Western media/propaganda outlets or as diplomats of the puppet state abroad, making a lucrative living out of their treason and out of the misery of their own people. I don’t think that I will ever get used to them. In a way, they are even worse than NATO, or at least equally as bad, and more deadly and venomous than the Taliban. There are many ways how one can betray his or her country. There are also countless reasons and justifications for treason. Historically, Western colonialists developed entire networks of local, “native” collaborators, all over the world. These people have been ready and willing to run down their devastated countries, on behalf of the European and later, US imperialists, in exchange for prominent positions, titles and ‘respect’. Unfortunately, Afghanistan is not an exception. On 21 January 2010, even Kabul Press had apparently enough, and it published a damning article “Afghan UN Ambassador’s $4.2 million Manhattan apartment”, referring to the super-luxury residence of then Afghan UN Ambassador, Zahir Tanin: Among the billions of dollars being spent propping up the Karzai government are some choice bits of New York City real estate. Number 1 is a 2,400 sq. ft. 3-bedroom corner apartment in the Trump World Tower, one of the world’s most expensive addresses. It was chosen by Zahir Tanin, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who lives there with his wife. According to Kabul press sources, eight other diplomats working in the Mission’s offices live about one hour away. The average rent for them is over $20,000 per month—extremely pricey even for Manhattan real estate. The previous Ambassador, Mr. Farhadi paid only $7,000 per month for all rent and expenses. Other ambassadors, like Taib Jawad (Afghan Abmassador to the U.S.) are living in luxury residences, why not me?” our source quotes Tanin as saying. ***** So many Afghans have left, many betrayed, but others are refusing to bend, remaining proud and honest. During my previous visit to the country, I worked along the road separating the districts 3 and 5 in Kabul, photographing literally decomposing bodies of drug-users. In June 2017 I returned, but this time I dared to film the people living under the bridges, and in deep infested hovels. Later I walked on the riverbank, trying to gain some perspective and to film from various angles. Someone was making threatening gestures from the distance; someone else aimed a gun at me. I ducked for cover. “Not very welcoming place, is it?” I heard loud laughter behind my back. Someone spoke perfect English. I turned back. A well-dressed man approached me. We exchanged a few words. I explained what I was doing here and he understood immediately. “Here is my card,” he said. Muhammad Maroof (Sarwan), Vice-President of the Duniya Construction Company,” it read. He continued: I came to this warehouse here to deliver my products, and I saw you filming. You’re lucky you were not hit by a bullet. “I want to talk,” he said, pointing his hand at the bridge. “Don’t film me, just take notes. You can quote me, even use my name.” He explained that he used to work for the US military, as an interpreter. Then he began speaking, clearly and coherently: The biggest mafias here are directly linked to both UK and US. The West lies that they want to stop trade with drugs in Afghanistan; they never will allow it to stop. My brother is a writer and he has images of the U.S. army giving water pumps, studs and other basic stuff, for the growth of poppies. The biggest supporter of drugs production in Afghanistan, and the export, is the UK government. They are dealing directly with the locals, even giving them money… The UK is also the major market for the export. Helmand, Kandahar, you name it, from there, directly, transport planes are taking off and going straight towards Europe, even the US. The Westerners are people who physically put drugs into the airplane at our airports. My relative was an interpreter for the British… He was killed by them, after he had been witnessing and interpreting at a meeting between the UK officials, and the local drug mafias. I was wondering whether he was certain he wanted to speak on the record. My interpreter was standing by, apparently impressed by what he was witnessing. Mr. Maroof did not hesitate: I have nothing to hide. They are destroying my country right in front of my eyes. What could be more horrifying than that? The Western occupation is ruining Afghanistan. I want the world to be aware of it, and I don’t care what could happen to me! ***** Not all the opposition to the present regime in Kabul is fighting for true independence and progressive ideals. Some have close links with the West or/and with the Mujahedeen. In Kabul, in June 2017, inside a makeshift camp built near the site of a devastating explosion which in May killed at least 90 people, injuring 400, I met with Ramish Noori, the spokesperson of Haji Zahir Qadir’s “Uprising for Change”. The powerful “Uprising” counts on at least a 1,000-men strong militia, one which is locked in brutal combat with ISIS (Daesh), and which has already beheaded several terrorist fighters in ‘retaliatory’ actions. Mr. Noory clearly indicated that the goal of his group is to force the present government to resign, even if that would have to happen with the help of foreign countries: We were shot at in Kabul and 6 protesters were killed, 21 injured. Professional Special Forces of Ashraf Ghani shot those who were killed point blank, in the face. Instead of killing terrorists, this government is killing innocent protesters; people who came to demand security after that barbaric terrorist attack which took lives of 90 people. We actually believe that many government officials are responsible for the killings. We also think that the government is helping to coordinate attacks of the terrorists. Mr. Samir, one of the protesters, began shouting in anger: The government is killing its own people, and so we want both Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah to resign. We want an entire reset of the Afghan system. Look what is happening all around the country: killings, bomb blasts and unbridled corruption! But when I press them hard, I feel that behind their words there is no sound ideology, just geographically swappable ‘civil society talk’. And perhaps some power struggle as well. I don’t know who is supporting them, who is behind them, but I feel that someone definitely is. What they say is right, but it is how they say it that worries me. I ask Ramish Noori about the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, and suddenly there is a long pause. Then a brief answer in a slightly uncomfortable tone of voice: We are ready to work with any country that is supporting our position. “Can I stop by later today?” I ask. Of course. Anytime. We’ll be here till the morning. We are expecting the Mujahedeen to join us in the early hours. Mujahedeen? Next time I will investigate further. ***** I visited the British Cemetery in Kabul. Not out of some perverse curiosity, but because, during my last visit, I was given this tip by a Russian cultural attaché: See how patient, how tolerant Afghan people are… After all that has been done to them… I’m glad that I went. The cemetery puts the events of the last 2 centuries into clear perspective. To a clear British perspective… Full of patriotic sentimentality, The Telegraph once described this place as: “Afghanistan: The corner of Kabul that is forever England.” There was no repentance, no soul-searching, no questions asked, like: What was England doing here, thousands of miles away from its shores, again and again… and again?” Above the names of fallen English soldiers, there was a sober but unrepentant dedication: This memorial is dedicated to all those British officers and soldiers who gave their lives in the Afghan wars of the 19th and 20th century. Renovated by the officers and soldiers of the British Contingent of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. February 2002. “We Shall Remember Them” The cemetery is well kept. There is no vandalism and no graffiti. In Afghanistan, the death of Englishmen, Spaniards and other foreigners is respected. Unfortunately, the death of Afghan people is not even worth commemorating, anymore. How many Afghans did those British troops massacre, in two long centuries? Shouldn’t there be a monument, somewhere in Kabul, to those thousands of victims of British imperialism? Perhaps there will be… one day, but not anytime soon. Again I drove to Bagram, filming the monstrous walls of the US military and air force base. Poppy growing next to US airforce base in Bagram Again I saw children with toy guns, running and imitating landing combat helicopters. Again I saw misery, right next to the gates of the base; poor women covered by burkas, babies in their arms, sitting in stifling heat on speed bumps, begging. I saw amputees, empty stares of poor local people. All this destitution, just a few steps away from tens of billions of dollars wasted on high-tech military equipment, which has succeeded in breaking the spirit of millions of Afghan people, but never in ‘liberating the country from terrorism’, or poverty. I drove to the village of Dashtak, in Panjshir Valley, to hear more stories about those jihadi cadres who were based here during the war with the Soviet Union. I was stopped, detained, interrogated, on several occasions, sometimes ten times per day: On the Afghan-Pakistani border which has recently experienced fighting between two countries, in Kabul, Jalalabad, Bargam. I lost track of who was who: police, army, security forces, local security forces, or militias? In front of Jalalabad Airport I tried to film an enormous US blimp drone, on its final approach before landing. I asked my driver to make a U-turn, my drift HD camera ready. One minute later, the military stopped the car, aiming its guns at us. I had to get out, put my hands on a wall, and surrender my mobile phones. After our identity was verified from Kabul, one of the soldiers explained: Yesterday, exactly the same Toyota Corolla drove by, made the same U-turn and then blew itself up, next to this wall… In Jalalabad, I spoke to a police officer wounded at the national Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) station, during a terrorist attack. It all felt surreal. The entire country seems to be dissolving; yet it is refusing to fall, to collapse. It is still standing. And despite rubble, fighting and the insane cynicism of the elites, there is still hope, and even some optimism left. I’m trying to understand. “Afghans living abroad keep spreading false rumors that we are finished, that everybody wants to leave,” explains Arif, my driver and interpreter. “But it’s not true. More and more people want to stay home, to improve things, to rebuild our motherland. She is beautiful, isn’t she?” We are passing through a winding road, enormous mountains on both sides, and a river with crystal-clear water just a few meters away. “She is,” I say. “Of course, she is.” ***** We stopped near a small mosque, almost clinging to a cliff. It was the month of Ramadan. Arif was diligent; he went to pray. I also left the car and went to look into a deep and stunning ravine. Another car arrived; an off-roader, most likely an armored vehicle. The driver killed the engine. Three heavily armed men descended. They left their machine guns near the entrance to the mosque, washed their feet, and then went inside to pray. Before they entered, we all nodded at each other, politely. Surprisingly, I did not feel threatened. I never did, in Afghanistan. The scenery reminded me of South America, most likely of Chile – tremendous peaks, a deep valley, serpentines and powerful river down below. I felt strong and alive in Afghanistan. Many things have gone wrong in this country, but almost everything was clear, hardly any bullshit. Mountains were mountains, rivers were rivers, misery was misery and fighters were fighters, good or bad. I liked that. I liked that very much. “Arif,” I asked, sipping Argentinian jerba mate from my elaborate metal straw, as we were gradually approaching Kabul. It was Malta Cruz, a common, harsh mate, but a decent one. Do you think I can get Afghan citizenship if we kick out Yanks and Europeans, defeat Taliban and Daesh, and rebuild socialist paradise here? I was joking, just joking, after a long and exhausting day of work around Jalalabad. However, Arif looked suddenly very serious. He slowed the car down. You like? You like Afghanistan that much? “Hmmm,” I nodded. “I think, if we win, they’ll make sure to give you Afghan nationality,” he finally concluded. We were still very far from winning. After returning me to my hotel, he categorically refused to take money for his work. I insisted, but he kept refusing. It all felt somehow familiar and good. Back in my hotel room, exhausted, I collapsed onto the bed, fully dressed. I fell asleep immediately. Then, late at night, there were two loud explosions right under the hill. Afghanistan is here. You love it or hate it, or anything in between. But you cannot cheat: you are here and if you know how to see and feel, then you slowly begin to know. Or you are not here, and you cannot understand or judge it at all. No book can describe Afghanistan, and I’m wondering whether even films can. Maybe poetry can, maybe a theatre play or a novel can, but I’m not sure, yet. All I know is that it is alive, far from being finished. Its heart is pulsating; its body is warm. If someone tells you that it is finished, don’t trust him. Come and see for yourself; just watch and listen. • All photos by Andre Vltchek http://clubof.info/